'The Oxford Project' Uses Photography as a Kind of Time Machine

Ultimately, The Oxford Project is an homage to Americana, a photographic record of small-town America and the story of intertwined lives. It is about history, personal and collective, and that ubiquitous force: change. This book, like the facets of human features, is so intriguing, it is nearly impossible to put down.

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As David Grann describes him in The Lost City of Z, British explorer Percy Fawcett was the last of the Victorian era's hard-bitten adventurers, a man who waded "into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose."

As human domesticity presses onward and communities sprawl further into undeveloped regions, the wildlife in those regions runs out of places to remain wild. Think of it as the gentrification of nature. Photographer Amy Stein sees it less as coexistence, and more as entrapment.

There's no human life in any of Jerry Siegel's photos, just the suggestion that it's still there. Humanity seems to be waiting silently on the edge of the frame, never in a rush to get back. Life has slowed down, slower than the usual Southern way.

Instead of challenging his beliefs, Shepard's descent into poverty only adds to the already vexing verisimilitudes of poverty. Instead of offering insight into what he experienced and what that means to others like him, Shepard offers a book dazed by reality and confused by how to respond to it.

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The fairy tale is a timeless tale. But we love to update, rearrange, reconfigure the familiar to make it new and more applicable, but the beautiful sometimes horrifying center still quivers, groans, and blushes (albeit what we consider to be the "center" shifts with time). Johanna DeBiase proves this with intelligence, humor, and creative insight in her "Time Upon Once: 3 Tales."

Raising children, I can imagine, is always a task. But being a child is no better (or worse). Clarence Darrow’s penetrating (and obfuscating) quote wraps it up nicely: “The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children.”

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In his new book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, Austin-based journalist Lawrence Wright weaves tales of abuse with stories from numerous ex-members of the Church of Scientology.

The fairy tale is a timeless tale. But we love to update, rearrange, reconfigure the familiar to make it new and more applicable, but the beautiful sometimes horrifying center still quivers, groans, and blushes (albeit what we consider to be the "center" shifts with time). Johanna DeBiase proves this with intelligence, humor, and creative insight in her "Time Upon Once: 3 Tales."

In an era when books are being banned, hers included, San Antonio's poet laureate Carmen Tafolla is mindfully doing what she does best: documenting the lives of those whose hard work and fierce spirit offer the preceding generations shoulders upon which we unwaveringly, if not consciously, stand.

Despite all the TV jokes about New Jersey, it has long been the bedrock for our best writers — from Dorothy Parker and Philip Roth to William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg — and don't forget the Boss, Bruce Springsteen. Now add Junot Díaz to that illustrious list.